John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough

John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, painting attributed to John Closterman; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, in full John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, marquess of Blandford, earl of Marlborough, Baron Churchill of Sandridge, Lord Churchill of Eyemouth, Reichsfürst (imperial prince)
(born May 26, 1650, Ashe, Devon, England—died June 16, 1722, Windsor, near London), one of England’s greatest generals, who led British and allied armies to important victories over Louis XIV of France, notably at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenaarde (1708).

Churchill received a commission in the foot guards in 1667 and served at Tangier from about 1668 to 1670. In the third Dutch War (1672–74), he served with the allied fleet that was defeated at Solebay on May 28, 1672, and was promoted captain. He went with the English troops sent in December 1672 to assist Louis XIV against the Dutch and distinguished himself at Maastricht with the duke of Monmouth. He was appointed colonel of the English regiment by Louis XIV in 1674 and served with distinction at Enzheim.

After his marriage to Sarah Jennings, an attendant upon Princess (later Queen) Anne, Churchill rose rapidly. On the accession of James II in 1685, he was made a lieutenant general and effective commander in chief, in addition to a peer of the realm. He demonstrated his political acumen by surviving the expulsion of the Roman Catholic James II in 1688, transferring his allegiance to the Dutch prince of Orange (who was to become William III, three weeks after his landing in England), having already given William assurances that he would in all circumstances stand by the Protestant religion. He was rewarded by William with the earldom of Marlborough, membership of the Privy Council, confirmation of his military rank, and a succession of commands in Flanders and in Ireland between 1689 and 1691, in which he was uniformly successful.

Marlborough seemed on the threshold of great achievements when, suddenly, at the end of 1691, he was removed from all his appointments. The next May he was imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of being implicated in the intrigues to restore James II, with the support of a French invasion to be launched from Cherbourg in the summer of that year. He was released soon afterward but remained wholly out of favour at court for three years and out of employment for the remainder of the war. Responsible contemporaries, however, never suspected him of treason. Although Marlborough certainly acted like all leading politicians of his age by making comforting assurances to the contender for the throne, as an insurance lest the regime be overthrown again, as it had been twice already in Marlborough’s lifetime, his quarrel with William did not originate in any suspicion of treason. He was dismissed, rather, because he led a substantial English faction opposed to the favours William bestowed on his Dutch associates.

In 1701 Louis XIV made it clear that he was again intent on advancing, through war, his claims upon the now-vacant throne of Spain and the Spanish empire. William III, now a sick man and in what turned out to be the last year of his life, appointed Marlborough to be, in effect, his successor in the struggle against the ambitions of Louis XIV, to which, in England as in Holland, William had devoted his life. On her accession, Queen Anne confirmed the appointment, and Marlborough crossed to the European continent to undertake the first of 10 successive campaigns in command of the English and Dutch forces and their auxiliaries. In this first campaign he captured Kaiserswerth in 1702 and cleared the territory between the Rhine and Meuse rivers. For these services a grateful sovereign created him duke of Marlborough.

Marlborough’s skills as a diplomat were also tried; he first created and then managed to maintain the Grand Alliance (the coalition of great and small powers that combined to oppose the ambitions of Louis XIV of France).

Bavaria had entered the war and joined the French in the attack on the heart of the Holy Roman Empire while the Austrian armies were engaged on the Rhine and in Italy. Without assistance to Austria the war would be lost, but Marlborough knew that the Dutch would oppose a distant campaign; therefore he attacked on the Moselle River, deceiving both friend and foe, and he deceived them again by a feint against Alsace. After a fierce struggle he took the Schellenberg fortress and opened the crossing of the Danube River at Donauwörth. On August 13, 1704, he engaged the main enemy force at Blenheim; a quarter (about 12,000) of his troops were killed or wounded, but the enemy casualties exceeded three times that number. On his return to the Netherlands, Marlborough took Trier and Trarbach. These victories altered the whole balance of power in Europe and put France firmly on the defensive. Marlborough received the principality of Mindelheim from the emperor and was granted the royal manor of Woodstock by act of Parliament.

In 1705 Marlborough was confident that the French could be beaten in any but the strongest of positions. The Dutch and Austrians, however, were less keen to cooperate after a year’s success, and by their lack of support they prevented Marlborough from exploiting his successes. Louis XIV had concluded that peace was necessary and that he could only get satisfactory terms by an assault on all fronts. Consequently, when Marlborough threatened to move between Namur and the French army, he was challenged near Ramillies. Feinting an attack upon the right, Marlborough concentrated his main attack upon the left, to the south of the village of Ramillies. There the Dutch bore the sharpest fighting, and Marlborough himself barely escaped with his life. The result was a crushing victory in which the French losses may have been five or six times those of the allies. With this and his later victory at Oudenaarde, he secured a reputation unrivaled until Napoleon’s rise.

Political rise and fall

At home Marlborough was an important political figure whose support was indispensable to any ministry. The key to this influence lay with his wife, who had been Anne’s firm companion and guide through all the political upheavals of the past two decades. Anne, though a woman with decided views and prejudices of her own, was, for the time being, content to leave her affairs in the hands of Sarah’s husband and his friend and political ally Sidney, earl of Godolphin, whom Anne made lord treasurer and, in effect, prime minister.

Both Marlborough and Godolphin were Tories of a traditional kind and so were staunch supporters of the crown and the court as well as of the church. They allied themselves at first with Robert Harley, later the 1st earl of Oxford, leader of a new breed of Tory hostile to the financial interests nurtured by the war. This alliance provided backing for the war against Louis XIV that produced the great victories of Blenheim and Ramillies, but increasingly, as the old Tories left the government one by one, Marlborough and Godolphin could find effective and consistent support for the war only from the Whigs. Sarah strongly advocated a Whig alliance, with the result that her influence over Anne, among whose prejudices was a strong dislike of the Whig leaders, rapidly declined. A political crisis in January 1708 resulted in Harley’s dismissal, and Marlborough and Godolphin were now entirely dependent upon the Whigs. Although Marlborough continued to win his battles, the Whigs proved unable to secure peace, and, by now weary of war, the people endorsed Anne’s dismissal of Godolphin and his Whig colleagues in the general election of 1710. Marlborough, who had already found himself increasingly isolated and without influence during the Whig predominance, was left in command of the army for another year, but when he endeavoured to take a political stand over the terms of peace being negotiated by the new government, he was dismissed in December 1711 from all his appointments after charges of misuse of public money had been made in the House of Commons. He took no further part in public life under Anne, retiring abroad when condemned by the Commons for misappropriation of public money. Although restored to favour under George I, Marlborough was already a sick man and lived in retirement up to his death.